Manager, Application Support

About the role

As the Manager, Application Support you will lead the team responsible for supporting Crown Castle’s business and enterprise applications, including ERP, real‑estate management platforms such as Sitetracker, ServiceNow, and other critical systems and integrations. The role is accountable for improving application reliability, strengthening support operations, and partnering with business and IT stakeholders to ensure these platforms enable efficient, stable, and scalable business processes.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team delivering reliable application support services to business and IT users, including managing managed service providers that provide specialized support.
• Establish operational metrics and reporting to measure performance, identify continuous‑improvement opportunities, and deliver actionable insights that improve business outcomes through automation, process discipline, and service reliability.
• Direct day‑to‑day production support of enterprise and business applications, ensuring reliability, timely incident response, effective issue resolution, and stable service delivery.
• Define and lead the application support service strategy, operating model, and reliability practices for critical applications.
• Ensure quality and reliability of the infrastructure and application stack through rigorous testing practices and observability tools.
• Drive implementation of AIOps solutions to quickly identify, address, and resolve production incidents.
• Use and enhance incident, problem, and change management processes for tier 1 and tier 2 applications, ensuring issues are prioritized, communicated, resolved, and prevented from recurring.
• Guide daily support activities, including intake prioritization, backlog management, service‑request trends, incident review, and coordination of planned work with business and IT stakeholders.
• Advocate for automation to remove operational load, building frameworks for automation and orchestration of manual processes.
• Partner with leaders to define, monitor, and improve SLAs, KPIs, SLOs, SLIs, and service‑quality metrics for production and non‑production applications across on‑premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms.
• Create effective partnerships with managed service providers, software vendors, and third‑party partners to improve support, service quality, issue resolution, and IT service transformation.
• Mentor and develop teammates to grow their technical and leadership skills.
• Identify core problems or opportunities within business processes, understand root causes, and assess impacts.

Requirements

Education / Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (Master’s preferred).
• Cloud, ITSM, application support, or service‑management certification preferred.

Experience / Minimum Requirements

• 7+ years supporting business and enterprise applications (ERP, real‑estate management, ITSM, workflow, or other mission‑critical SaaS/on‑premises systems).
• 5+ years leading technical or application support teams with a proven track record of improving reliability, service delivery, stakeholder engagement, and operational performance.
• 3+ years in a cloud environment, preferably AWS.
• Experience with tools such as Splunk, DataDog, Grafana, PagerDuty, Dynamics, etc.
• Extensive scripting/programming experience (Python, PowerShell, JSON).
• Hands‑on experience automating support processes through orchestration, integrations, monitoring, workflow design, or cloud‑native services.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, EKS, Fargate).
• Broad expertise in large‑scale distributed systems, monitoring/observability tooling, and the software development lifecycle.
• Strong technical problem‑solving skills and ability to learn new technologies quickly.
• Ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities.
• Project planning and organization skills, including building project plans aligned with organizational objectives.

Expectations

• Effectively influence and interact with leaders across the organization.
• Encourage the team to develop solutions that solve strategic problems.
• Coach others on presenting ideas to build credibility and respect.
• Supervise, coordinate, and provide leadership to professional employees to accomplish operational plans.
• Maintain awareness of changing organizational conditions and adapt approaches accordingly.
• Build belonging within the team by fostering collaboration.
• Take primary responsibility for relationships with product and business stakeholders to plan and prioritize work.

Organizational relationship

Reports to: Director, Platform & Cloud Engineering

Direct reports: 4‑5 software engineers and MSP vendor resources

Where you will work

This role follows a 4:1 hybrid model in Crown Castle’s Canonsburg or Houston office, working on‑site Monday‑Thursday with the option to work remotely on Fridays.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare plans with highly subsidized premiums and up to $2,000 annual company contribution to a Health Savings Account (HSA) for employee and dependents.
• Market‑leading 401(k) plan with up to 10% company contributions (5% match + 5% profit sharing based on employee contributions).
• New‑child leave: up to 8 weeks of 100% paid leave for birth or legal adoption; birth mothers receive an additional 8 weeks of 100% paid medical leave.
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year of eligible tuition and fees.
• Crown Castle scholarship program: up to $10,000 per recipient each year for eligible dependent children of employees and interns.
• Matching charitable contributions up to $1,000 per year per teammate.
• Generous paid time‑off (minimum 18 days per year based on years of service) plus 10 company holidays and 2 floating holidays.
• Free beverages and snacks in all offices.

Pay

Salary range: $129,000 – $177,500 annually. Compensation may also include discretionary annual cash bonus, commissions, and equity incentives, depending on the position, experience, and location.